1734
1735

I wonder how often he has poor people to dinner to hear their viewpoints?

1736

The idea of breaking up facebook, or any of the big tech companies, is easily one of the dumbest parts of Warren’s platform.

1737

Why? What has changed since the Bell break up to make it a nonstarter now?

The idea that we can’t do it is merely a product of the fact that we haven’t done it in a while. We should have been doing it more often in the past

1738

It isn’t clear that “breaking up” Facebook would solve the specific issues that exist with tech giants. However, I think that taken as generally “a political will to regulate tech companies”, it’s a good concept.

1739

I’m just not clear how breaking up Facebook would actually work. Would you break it up along product lines? If so, why? What are we trying to accomplish here?

Ultimately, the market would be best served with a true competitor to Facebook, but breaking the company up would not do that. You could lop off WhatsApp and Oculus, or break out the advertising arm into a different company, but that doesn’t address the real problem, IMO.

1740

Bell was actually a monopoly, which involved an inherent competitive advantage over any other competing company by virtue of actual physical infrastructure necessary to make a telephone network.

None of that is true with Facebook, Google, Apple, or Amazon.

The dominance of modern tech companies stems purely from the fact that they actually provide supremely useful services.

Anyone else could totally make a competitive search engine to Google… nothing about what Google does, in even the smallest way, hinders someone else from making a competitive product. There are other competitors in that space. Google is just better than them. And that’s why, from the perspective of someone who uses their tech (both personally and professionally), I really do not want some government bureaucrat fucking that up.

Amazon’s probably the only one that MIGHT be considered anti-competitive in some cases, in that they now sell their own stuff on Amazon, and thus can potentially have a competitive advantage in selling their “store brand” vs. other products. But even there, I feel that Amazon is very clearly a net positive in the marketplace.

While some may say, “Amazon is killing brick and mortar stores,” I need to point out that Amazon is tending to erode one very specific type of brick and mortar retailer… that being the giant corporate store. And those stores had already, previously, damaged the small individually owned retailers that came before them. Amazon is actually providing a platform for smaller retailers to sell their goods to a vastly larger market, and in replacing the giant faceless corporate retailers, it’s causing a resurgence in small individual retailers again, since that’s the niche which Amazon doesn’t cover.

If I want crap that I can buy at Walmart, I can just as easily (more easily) buy it from Amazon. But if I want something where I want to actually talk to a salesperson for expertise, or buy a handmade thingy, then I go to a small shop (which I’ve seen a ton of new ones open in the past few years).

And ultimately, those tech companies are THE economic future of America. They are the industrial giants of the next century. Harming them isn’t going to achieve anything other than yielding power to places like China.

And other than Amazon, where you could potentially break stuff and say they can’t sell their own stuff in their market, “breaking up” the other tech companies is very unclear, and doesn’t actually have a clear path to achieving ANY goal.

1741

I think the idea is that you would break the advertising arm into multiple competing companies. The platform itself would be a regulated monopoly that would have to offer the same terms to each spun-off ad seller; each spun-off company would be limited to a certain fraction of the total market.

1742

I think a case could be made that Facebook is stifling competition by buying up everyone who even remotely threatens their position.

1743

Yeah to all this. I would prefer we identify the ways Facebook (and other social media) are harming us and address those things individually.

For example, we need better control of our personal data. A GDPR for the US would be step one. Then forcing companies to allow us to own our data would be step two.

Next is addressing the use of social media to spread lies and misinformation. That’s harder since we have the First Amendment so we have to tread lightly there, but we should try to address that somehow.

We don’t need to break up Facebook, we just need to force them to be better.

1744

Bell was not an absolute monopoly at its breakup in 1984, having been legally restrained to less than 85% of the market since the 50s, and actually controlling less of the market than that share.

Who are Facebook’s competitors? Who are Amazon’s? What share of the market do they have?

1745

Part of the issue is that Warren’s break-up plan seems not to address the main concerns that people have. So it’s either misdirected or simply punitive. The competition problem with Facebook and Google is not primarily that they own participants on their platforms. It’s that Facebook and Google control virtually all of the online advertising market.

Some of the other parts of the plan make sense, but they apply without the breaking up part.

1746

Luckily, Elizabeth Warren maintains a website that clearly lays out her rationales, plans, and positions. (Hillary Clinton maintained a similar one.) She has written many words there on “breaking up big tech.” Here are a few of them:

America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies:

  • Using Mergers to Limit Competition
    . . .
  • Using Proprietary Marketplaces to Limit Competition
    . . .

Weak antitrust enforcement has led to a dramatic reduction in competition and innovation in the tech sector. Venture capitalists are now hesitant to fund new startups to compete with these big tech companies because it’s so easy for the big companies to either snap up growing competitors or drive them out of business. The number of tech startups has slumped, there are fewer high-growth young firms typical of the tech industry, and first financing rounds for tech startups have declined 22% since 2012.
. . .
In this tradition, my administration would restore competition to the tech sector by taking two major steps:

First, by passing legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.
. . .
Second, my administration would appoint regulators committed to reversing illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers.

Loads and loads of details for all of this at that link. She might have put some thought into this issue.

1747

It’s true that her plan doesn’t really address this at all, at least not directly. It also doesn’t talk about the strangehold both of them have on the types of services they offer. Google may be the best search engine, but there’s no realistic way any competitor could ever arise without spending the kind of money that only Google has. These companies were the best first-responders to the new paradigms represented by online markets and have used that position to entrench themselves in the public’s mind. That said, regulating their platforms like utilities seems like a good first step.

1748

Forcing companies like Google and Apple to split apart into smaller companies isn’t the answer here. All that will do is help drive the information economy off-shore like we already did with manufacturing.

What we need is a stronger FCC with a focus on tech. We need better and smarter regulation and the ability to go after corporations like Facebook, Apple and Sinclair Broadcasting Group when they’re caught doing something they shouldn’t be. Right now the FCC and by extension the government are toothless because the corporations basically own the politicians. Elect better people, pass better regulation, see better compliance and results.

1749

This is a load of crap. Google may have been better than competitors back in the day when they got started, but these days there are equally good options. I use Duck Duck Go myself for search, there are other webmails as good as Gmail (I’m just too lazy to switch on that front), etc. The advantage Google has today is name recognition, and the default position on Android, and heavy influence on regulators, and all the other things that come with being the big dog.

We should absolutely be breaking up Amazon’s platform vs seller identities. Otherwise this too is a load of crap.

Facebook is a bit of a trickier case due to the network size effects inherent in a social media platform, but I don’t see any reason why you can’t regulate their acquisitions (WhatsApp, Instagram) to encourage competition in that space.

A combination of both those things would make sense for Google and Apple. A lot of Google’s size benefits come from synergies between divisions like Chrome and Android pushing Google search, and the lack of privacy restrictions allowing Gmail and so on to target ads. Split those up. Maybe some of the other Alphabet divisions could be separate companies. You can apply the same ideas to Apple.

I’m not saying any of this is the solution, or even that it would resolve most of the problem of these companies having too much power, but it would be a start. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who have thought about it a whole lot more than me. But saying there’s no path that would achieve any goal is just ludicrous.

1750

We’ve had these discussions in other topics before, a monopoly neither has to be a true monopoly nor the only kid in the playground to be considered a monopoly.

The power Google and Facebook has, not just with people like consuming the content but the make a break advertising and results for companies is pretty extraordinary. I don’t know if the answer is to break them up, but the idea that it doesn’t matter because some other tech company can try and do the same thing is pretty ridiculous. And… both of them do have a habit of gobbling up even more companies and getting more access and market share.

1751

I use Bing… Which probably says more about me then I would like to admit.

1752

If this is true, then go nuts. Go use those other options. No one is stopping you. Google certainly isn’t stopping you.

And that is at the heart of anti-trust.

Having a company like google who provides a massive number of useful services… is not bad. That’s GOOD. The point of anti-trust laws is that if a company can actually prevent other companies from doing what they do, and competing, then in the absence of competition you are left with a situation where they do NOT provide good services to the consumers, and are not forced to improve.

But that is clearly not the case with the big tech companies. Hell, in many cases, those big tech companies are competing against each other, directly.

But the key element is that if you want to make your own company and compete in these spaces, you absolutely can. You can make your own search engine, and create your own advertising network to go with it. You can create your own cloud services. You can create your own online retailer. You can do any of these things… Hell, in many cases, the services provided by the large technology companies actually make doing these kinds of things infinitely more accessible to smaller developers. Google provides me with all kinds of technology that I use in my own products, which would have been prohibitively costly to develop myself from the ground up (and it would almost certainly be inferior). Amazon provides me with easy access to massive cloud infrastructure, cheaper than I could ever set up myself. And this isn’t even touching on the countless services that those companies provide to me, at either a nominal or zero cost, that improve my life as a consumer in my private life.

It’s going to be super hard for you to actually match the quality of service provided by those big tech companies, but that’s not their problem. It would be insane for anti-trust laws to be used in order to degrade the services provided, in order to make it easier for other companies to compete… because that would be ultimately undermining the fundamental purpose of those laws (which is to improve things for consumers, via competition).

1753

One interesting fact on the side of Google and Amazon, for example, is that they spend billions, even tens of billions of dollars in R&D to improve their products. Google has thousands of engineers working to make Google Search a better product. They spend tons of money inventing ways to make it faster and more efficient. If they thought they had an impenetrable monopoly, they wouldn’t spend that much, but clearly they are deathly afraid every day that someone will come along and take their place.

Likewise, Amazon’s R&D budget is gigantic.

That’s not really how true monopolies act.

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